After reading the recent article in the Houston Chronicle about the reactions to President Obama’s speech to students, I am very curious about the actual number or percentage of students whose parents either kept them home for the day or submitted an “opt-out” form to excuse their child from viewing the speech at school.

From the article (I have highlighted the numbers in bold):

At Frost Elementary on Houston’s south side, third- and fourth-graders gathered in the school’s library to watch Obama’s address on TV. No parents opted out their children, according to Principal Christian Winn….

Not all school principals, superintendents or parents in the Houston area were as enthusiastic about Obama’s speech. Several school districts decided not to show the speech live. Galena Park, for example, recorded the speech and teachers can opt to show it later in the week. The district has received opt-out notices from parents of 59 of about 21,300 students, said spokesman Craig Eichhorn…

In the Klein school district, which encouraged teachers to show the speech if it fit into their lessons, most parents seemed to let their children watch. At Klein Forest High School, for example, about two dozen of the 3,400 students were excused…

Westside High School in the Houston Independent School District appeared to draw one of the largest protests from parents. About 300 students, or 10 percent of the study body, were opted out of watching the speech…

While I do understand that some districts decided not to air the speech (or at least not air it live), for those that did air the speech the “opt-out” numbers seem very low to me considering all of the noise that was made prior to the speech being aired.

I don’t see data on how many phone calls the districts received and whether or not the number of phone calls was comparable to the numbers above, but I do find the low numbers very interesting.

What about your school or district?  What was your attendance like yesterday?  How many students on your campus were opted-out of viewing the speech by their parents?

I’ve been wanting to write this post for the past three days, but I have been constantly “counting to ten”, hoping to calm down enough to be able to write a coherent post that doesn’t devolve into an angry rant.

I am still not calm enough to write a short essay, so I am just posting my thoughts here in bullets. Perhaps later I can expand on some of these thoughts in a longer post.

First, let me be very clear and say that I think it is absolutely ridiculous that people are protesting the President’s upcoming address to school children and that some schools and districts have actually caved in to the pressure to censor the President’s speech.

Here are the rest of my thoughts on this issue:

• This is NOT unprecedented. It has now been widely reported that previous presidents have made similar addresses to school children in the past. There is nothing wrong with the leader of our country — the President of the United States — making a speech to school children about the importance of staying in school, setting goals, studying hard, and working to succeed.
• If you are offended by the suggested curriculum activities then let me explain the difference between “suggested” and “mandated” to you. A suggestion can be ignored, but a mandate must be followed. I am an educator and most of the educators I know would probably have either not used the SUGGESTED activities or would have only used the ones that applied to their current curriculum. All educators I know, on the other hand, are forced to comply with the UNFUNDED MANDATE of No Child Left Behind — and this HAS hurt our education system far more than a 15 minute speech possibly could.
• If you are so afraid of a socialist agenda then please, remove your child from the tax-payer-funded public schools and please do not apply for Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid at any time in your life. All of those are essentially socialist institutions.
• If the President is making a speech regarding the importance of staying in school and studying hard, then what message are students receiving when they are barred from watching the speech because their parents complained or — even worse — because their parents kept them home from school for the day. Nice.
• The President, regardless of whether or not you agree with his politics, does serve as an excellent role model for MANY at-risk minority youth in our country. I see way too many of these students failing, dropping out of school, and joining gangs. It is well known in the education community that too many of these youth end up serving jail time rather than completing school and becoming productive members of society. If the President can have ANY influence over these students then I support his efforts fully. I prefer full classrooms and schools rather than full prisons and correctional facilities.
• What will our children think when they look back on this moment and see how their parents and their educators reacted to this event? How will they view us?
• Why is it okay for so many people to speak so poorly and so disrespectfully of our President now? When Bush was in office and anyone argued with his policies and his actions they were automatically labeled as traitors and terrorist sympathizers. It was NOT okay then to speak out against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but now it’s perfectly okay to speak out — and to speak dishonestly — about efforts to reform the health care industry and education. This attitude by a certain segment of our population disgusts and saddens me greatly.
• Parents are with their children much longer than teachers and MUCH longer than a 15 minute speech by the President.  Why would anyone who has confidence in their own parenting skills and their own guidance of their children be afraid to let their child listen to such a short speech?  It baffles me.
• Please spare me the “interrupted instructional time” argument. I’ve spent the past ten years working in our public schools and that argument doesn’t work for me. Let’s get rid of during-school-time pep rallies, motivational assemblies, and test-prep pep rallies first before we can use the “interrupted instructional time” argument.
• I am much more concerned about some of the text books being used in our schools than I am about what the President might say in 15 minutes.  Too many of our textbooks are full of inaccuracies or are outdated (science, social studies) — and don’t even get me started on the personal agendas that make their way into textbooks by state-level adoption committees (see recent issue with Texas and Social Studies curriculum).

I’m done. For now. I am sure I have left something out, but I can always come back and update this post.

I am sure that some of you will agree with what I have written and that some of you will disagree with what I have written. If you have more to add to what I have said above, please share your thoughts in the comments.

UPDATE:  I want to be sure and link to others who have also posted some eloquent thoughts on this issue.  Please visit the following links to read more:

The Obama Speech – Will Richardson

Representing More Than 20 Minutes – Ryan Bretag

It IS About Intellectual Freedom, Not Politics — Buffy Gunter Hamilton

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The ASCD blog published a fitting post about the “teachable” moments for educators in John Hughes’ movies from the 1980s.  I agree with the idea that there are “teachable” moments in those movies…

As a Gen X educator, I am very saddened by John Hughes’ untimely death. My friends and I really connected to the teen characters in his movies — everyone could find at least one character that they could identify with whether it was the jock, the nerd, the weirdo/outcast, the preppie, or “all of the above”.

As an educator, I think the movie that stands out the most to me now is The Breakfast Club. It was always one of my favorites of Hughes’ movies, but as an educator it is a reminder to me that all students are different, all students have different backgrounds, and all come to school with different “baggage” — and sometimes that baggage is exactly what we don’t expect.

All of our students are different and we need to be accepting of those differences.  We need to make “room” for those differences in our classrooms, in our curriculum & instruction, in our school structures, and in our extracurricular activities, clubs, and organizations.

I will end by quoting the “letter” that Brian (Anthony Michael Hall) reads at the end of the movie:

Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. But we think you’re crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us…In the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain…an athlete…a basket case…a princess…and a criminal…Does that answer your question?

Sincerely yours, the Breakfast Club.

Rest in Peace, Mr. Hughes. Thank you for your creativity — your movies entertained us, affirmed us, and educated us.

UPDATE:  One more reason for establishing more online learning: kids with illnesses

Ever since I read Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns I’ve been thinking about how unprepared our education system is for the technology innovations that can allow us to reinvent schooling from the ground up.  Our education system as a whole is locked into a very specific model that depends upon and feeds into other established systems (businesses and cultural systems).

Over the past several months we have also been dealing with an economic situation that has even threatened some school district budgets leading some districts to cut staff.  And still, for the most part, we remain steadfastly married to our traditional structures.

One year ago I took steps to begin some part-time online teaching for two reasons: 1) to learn more about the pedagogy of the online classroom and 2) to diversify my skill set and expand my employment options.  Fortunately I have a bachelor’s and master’s degree in a subject area outside of education which makes it easy for me to apply for many college-level online adjunct positions in that content area.   This has been a very rewarding and productive endeavor.

What I have discovered however, is that colleges and universities — and many private or for-profit K-12 virtual schools — include free training as part of the interview and hiring process, while some of the public (state-run) virtual schools require potential teachers to pay for their own state-approved training program (usually in the neighborhood of $500 per course) before being hired.  There is a very strong message in both of those approaches — one says “welcome, come on in and we will prepare you for this” and the other says “sure, you can do this, as long as we don’t have to invest in your development…”

As I watch the current news about the potential Swine Flu pandemic and I read recent blog posts regarding the need for practicing online teaching and learning so that one can shift online if a state of emergency is declared (I love Brit’s suggestion of doing once-per-year weeklong “online drills”) and “laptops as response to emergency”, I can’t help but reflect back on my earlier thoughts about how unprepared our system is for anything outside of the traditional approach to education.  We don’t even consider it a priority to train teachers (for free) to be able to teach online.  At the very least we could set up state-approved certifications based on an exam rather than one-size-fits-all fee-based training, and allow teachers to just take a certification exam.

There are many good reasons to begin making the shift to more online or blended learning experiences in our classrooms — including emergency situations such as a major flu outbreak, snow & ice storms, or a hurricane — but we are not making the investment in this as we should be.  I pray that we don’t see a widespread outbreak of this flu, but if we do then we are extremely unprepared for ensuring that learning continues even if the schools are shut down for health & safety reasons.  It may be too late to prepare in this particular situation, but it’s not too late to begin preparing for future emergencies — as well as to just innovate to ensure that we can meet the needs of many students who aren’t well served by our current traditional structures.

A few things we can start doing now:

• Make more of an effort to implement 1:1 across all schools and districts
• Ensure that ALL teachers are trained and have experience in facilitating online learning
• Let go of our belief that “seat time” is the only way to measure learning or productivity
• Enable employees — including teachers — to access the network remotely via VPN
• As a society, realize that schools are not babysitters — students should stay home if they are sick

What else would you add to this list?

HUGE hat tip to Clarence Fisher for finding this video and posting it on his blog.   This is exactly what I wrote about and what I envisioned for schools in my book Wikified Schools

I especially like the part in the video where they talk about the “Loop Marketplace” — I can easily see that translating into a “stock market” for instructional strategy ideas or lesson plans across a district.

The Learning Circuits blog’s Big Question for April is:

Stuck? Getting unstuck?

There’s really quite a bit to this question.

* Do you sometimes feel stuck? Feel like you have so many more ideas about how you could help your organization or your clients, but that What Clients Want is just some training?
* Should you attempt to get unstuck? How hard should you push your internal or external clients to get them to see the full range of what is possible? Or should you give them what they ask for?
* If you are feeling some level of stuck, what should you do to get unstuck? How important is it to get unstuck? Is it okay to learn a lot about all kinds of different solutions, but to primarily work on simple training solutions?
* If you are stuck, should you be concerned about your future?

As I read the question the first response that came to mind was “I started blogging!” in order to get “unstuck”. I found myself “stuck” when the reform work we were trying to do on our campus came to a halt due to district and campus administrative transitions. I felt that my hands were tied, and blogging provided the creative release that I needed to explore ideas and discuss positive solutions to the many challenges we were/are facing in our urban schools. It didn’t change my immediate environment and it certainly did not impact my colleagues directly, but it helped me feel empowered and gave me the drive that I needed to continue pushing for change in my organization.

The second time I became stuck was AFTER I started blogging. By becoming immersed in the world of blogging I became immersed in Web 2.0 and before long I began to feel very alone in my day-to-day work where no one else was speaking the Web 2.0 language. It was ironic — the “getting unstuck” solution that saved me before — blogging — created the new “stuck” situation where I didn’t feel as if I could move forward with the ideas that I was being exposed to in my online experiences.

My solution to that situation was to write a book. In the course of writing the book I ended up taking a new position that now seems like fate because of the many opportunities it allowed me to share these ideas with interested colleagues. In less than a year my immediate world has changed and the ideas in which I am interested (and that I have written about on my blog and in my book) are being taken very seriously by many people in my organization.

Did these two solutions change the problems in my organization? No. However, they did help me change my perspective and find a place for my ideas — even if that place was outside of my geographic region. While the two “getting unstuck” solutions that I described above are very specific and may not work for everyone, they do share common attributes that other solutions may also provide:

• connecting with others
• engaging in dialogue
• expression of ideas
• opportunities for creativity

What have you done to “get unstuck”? Share your thoughts on your blog or by posting a comment to the original Big Question post over on Learning Circuits.

Earlier this week ASCD’s blog featured my blog, and today they apparently mentioned it in the SmartBrief newsletter that is mailed out to all ASCD members and subscribers.

Pretty cool. My work colleagues teased me a little by saying they felt honored to know such a famous person. I just laughed and asked where was the fortune that was supposed to go along with the fame? It was all in good fun. I feel honored that ASCD chose to feature my blog, but I also keep it in perspective. They selected my blog because they apparently found some value in some of my past posts – but it means nothing if I don’t continue to strive to write meaningful and relevant posts.

So for a few days I will go ahead and let myself feel a little satisfaction that my name appeared in an ASCD SmartBrief. Then I will get over it and get back to writing.

On another note, I am pleased to see the LeaderTalk (of which I am a contributor) has now moved to it’s new home as an Education Week blog. Yay!

Technorati Tags: ASCD

I can’t let another day go by without expressing some thoughts I have regarding our current economic situation and our students. Maybe I’m just ready to explode over everything I am hearing in the news and I just have to get this off of my chest – and maybe seeing the president on television tonight was the final straw…

Before I continue, let me ask you one question:

Are you talking about this news in your classroom with your students?

This is big. This is huge. This needs to a part of classroom discussions right now. This is a learning moment.

Now for my personal opinion on this whole mess…

I am angry. I am angry with the financial institutions that created this mess. I am angry with out government for allowing it to happen and allowing it to reach a point of crisis. I am angry that there are other citizens in my country who are clueless about this issue and who only allow their opinions to be informed by mainstream media.

I don’t agree with the bailout as it has been proposed. I believe that individuals – especially individuals who are in leadership positions in companies, financial institutions, and government – should be held accountable for their actions.

I do believe that something must be done, but I disagree with the “used car salesman” tactics that were utilized by this administration in attempting to have this bailout approved quickly by Congress with no careful reading or discussion. I am glad that so many of our members of Congress have refused to approve this without careful scrutiny.

Back to our students – I ask you this: What lessons are we teaching our students right now in this entire debate over this mess? What are they learning about responsibility? What are they learning about ethics? What are they learning about power and corruption?

What are they learning about leadership?

What should they be learning?

As some of you know, I live and work in Houston, Texas. This past week we have endured Hurricane Ike and the aftermath. This morning I woke up in my own bed for the first time in several days – we had electricity to our home restored finally and were able to come home after staying with relatives for a number of days. We are among the lucky ones – so many people still do not have power and many do not have homes to return to after the damage caused by the wind and the water.

Yesterday as we were cleaning up at our house and moving clothes, food, and ourselves back in, I was reflecting on the entire experience and what struck me was the variety of sounds that I have heard throughout the entire experience. I have no other way to explain this other than to just write it out in a train-of-thought manner, so I hope you won’t mind if I let my thoughts just pour out on the page/screen…

Before the storm

Saws, hammers, nail guns, and drills… the sound of our neighborhood boarding up…

During the storm

There was little rain at first… silence as the city sheltered in place in advance of the storm….

As the wind began to pick up I could hear the leaves rustling around the house… it was very, very light at first and the light breeze seemed to last forever as we waited…

As dark fell, the wind picked up and I began hearing the first stronger gusts – a light roar that only lasted a few seconds at a time…

The evening wore on and the wind grew in strength… the gusts were more frequent now with a steady light roar of the sustained winds blowing through the trees…

A very steady roar now as the wind raged outside… I started to hear things hitting the windows and walls of our room… the gusts sounded explosive as the wind howled… the rain was pelting the windows sharply now…

Transformers blowing – the sky constantly lighting up with the green flashes of the transformers as they blew out… the ones closest to us made a horrific sound – a low boom/hum that was as frightening as the sound of the wind…

As the eye wall came over us the wind became a solid and steady howl that drowned out the sound of blown transformers…

End of the storm

Silence in the light of dawn as the wind died down…

The sound of water rushing in a small river down the street… it looked as if we had moved the house to the bank of a canal…

Silence as the city waited for the storm to pass…

The crackle of the radio as we listened to the news reporters describe the extent of the damage…

After the storm

Chainsaws buzzing for days as neighbors and work crews scrambled to clear trees and branches from streets and yards…

The whirring hum of generators everywhere… all over the city…

SIrens, oh so many sirens… fire, police, ambulance… racing to one emergency after another… the sound of sirens and chainsaws has lasted for more than a few days…

Cheering… the sound of clapping and cheering around neighborhoods as soon as the electricity is restored.

Other Thoughts

Our schools are out until at least next Monday – possibly later… it’s hard to start schools back up with no electricity, shortages of gas (for buses), and with so many families still lacking basic needs.

It is quite unnerving to drive around in a major city where nearly all of the traffic signals are out because of lack of electricity.

I am so grateful to our mayor for fixing the water situation so quickly. It was bad enough to not have electricity, but to not have running water in the city of Houston was a (thankfully) short-lived nightmare.

I am so thankful to all of the people involved in getting so many of the grocery stores up and running so quickly. You are all heroes in my opinion.

The other heroes – ALL of the electrical workers and crews who have come from all over the country to restore power to the entire area. I know you are all working hard and that this is not a quick & easy process. Thank you for everything that you are doing.

It breaks my heart to think of all of the people who have lost everything in this storm – and so many of them didn’t have much to lose to begin with.

I’m frightened by the thought that all of the damage that I see was caused by a category 2 hurricane. What would a cat 3 or 4 or 5 do to us?

I’m grateful that Mother Nature only sent us a cat 2 storm and that she then sent us a VERY nice cold front to keep things cool as we worked on restoring our lives without electricity.  It could have been so much worse than it was.

I’m tired, beyond stressed out, and ready for life to get back to normal. Not sure when “normal” will come back, but I’ll try to be patient.

Technorati Tags: IKE, hurricane

America’s new disease has reached its peak all too quickly. Obesity, according to the World Health Organization, has reached “epidemic proportions.” Diabetes afflicts some 7% of the American population and has been pegged at an annual cost of $132 billion and rising. In all too typical narcissistic fashion, a 2004 documentary on the matter was nominated for an Academy Award. (More amusingly, it grossed more outside of the United States.) McDonald’s has scrapped its largest offering and is now printing nutrition labels on its packaging. All said, health is now en vogue – economically, politically, and culturally.

The biggest push focuses on children, where the count of the obese have tripled over the past 20 years and is now more than 17%. Health classes, and their glossy textbooks, march through chapters on depression, drug use – and sedentary lifestyles. More importantly, nutritional standards are increasing to limit what is available in the cafeterias and vending machines. Beyond this, of course, political groupthink has a tendency to go too far. One can imagine the satisfaction of accomplishment in the name of good that accompanied the Board of Education for my Maryland district’s approval of a measure requiring a full year of physical education for its students.

Until then, the policy had required one half-year of gym and another of health, making for one credit. The extra-half year is applicable for students in the graduating class of 2010. That there were no half-credit courses offered at the time of approval – or for the now freshman students’ sophomore year – marks only the beginning of this problem.

The move should rightfully be attacked on several fronts. The first of which is the diminished options available to students. Some parents have begun to lobby for an opt-out, with special relevance to athletes. After all, as a student notes, “you can’t tell me that somebody who does three sports a year needs another gym class.” The second argument is the value to students: colleges should not be all that interested in a student’s ability to show up to class on time in uniform – this, not state-of-the-art recreational centers, is the undeniable norm in most school districts, where neglect intensified because of the minimal (half or one-year) time requirements. School systems are attempting to have the best of both worlds, posturing themselves as strong and proactive on social concerns, while limiting the extent to which they have to invest resources. If students were required for four, not one, years districts would have to show some degree of results and meaningful use of their pupils’ time.

A gym class then, is not as valuable as the opportunity to take more rigorous and potentially differentiating classes. (Arts teachers, especially, are nonplussed at the thought of losing students to a gym class.) Not that the policy needs any more mockery, but a new study has found that sleep can help kids stay slim. The third option caps the height of thoughtless policy: a National Bureau of Economics Research report has found that “PE time has no detectable impact on youth BMI or the probability that a student is overweight.” It should be clear that obesity is a problem, but is it the school’s to address – especially when they are not willing to invest the resources to make such a program successful. It again forces an acknowledgment of schools’ central problem: their stifling ambiguity of purpose and mandatory courses indifferent to individual needs.

The debate provokes the same sort of question that Joe Nathan raised in his 1999 book on charter schools: school reform is at times nothing more than a “con job” meant to distract from the ultimate social issues of poverty. The same is the case here – the ultimate issues here being the lack of universal healthcare, affordable and easy access to nutritional foods, and sedentary lifestyles. I would argue that schools would be far more effective in increasing the nutritional value of their lunch offerings and, perhaps, publishing their students’ body-mass index on each child’s report card, as one Texas senator proposed in 2005. Autonomous schools are central to my paper’s proposals – they would be free to focus on this issue, given complete control over policy and funding, as much or as little as they preferred. (Perhaps a television tax shouldn’t be dismissed after all.)

It’s not hard to see where the policy started: After all, the NBER notes, high school enrollment in PE has fallen from 42% to 28% between 1991 and 2003. Would it be too much wishful thinking on the capacity of man to hope that there was much more to the Board’s decision than messy false causations? No matter: some arguments can’t be lost.

from Kansas – American education.

In my previous post I mentioned some new internet technologies I use to help kids learn about their world. I think the tool that’s having it’s greatest impact on students is YouTube. Not only is it changing the way we view video, but it’s changing the way we experience the world.

I teach a class about race and gender biases in the media at Santa Monica College, and in that class we always end up on the subject of the police’s excessive force on minorities, especially when discussing the civil rights movement. We talk about how the media, at the time controlled by whites, had a biased view of the events and sided with police. The minority community being oppressed was underrepresented in the media and had no say in the topic.

Fast forward to 2006 in which a video appeared online of a UCLA student being tasered in the university’s library. The video was taken by another student in the library using his cell phone camera, and posted it to YouTube shortly after. After being seen by influentials in the blogosphere (including MySpace), and getting reported on by the traditional news media (for being so popular on YouTube more than for being a case of police brutality), the video spread like wildfire. To date, the video has been seen by over two million people (in various YouTube postings), and has gained more exposure than if it had appeared on television.

This event along with numerous others shows how web 2.0 ideas have lead to the democratization of media. No longer do you need to be a part of the establishment, with credentials and years of experience, to break a news story. Reporters are everywhere, with cameras in the pockets and “embedded” in the places where news happens. Compared to traditional news media (and with a few exceptions), censorship is low and exposure is high. News is raw and unfiltered. Viewers can make up their own minds about how to interpret these messages.

And herein lies a problem. With videos being posted by anyone and everyone, and without clear explanations or points of view, the videos lack perspective and context. Anyone can post a video about anything, but what does it all mean? Is it a positive contribution to society, or a negative one? A lot of the old rules about intent and social benefit of the media have to be rewritten.

Media is usually created to sell a product or service (ads), or an ideology or lifestyle (political perspective or some sort of bias). But what if media is trying to sell neither? What if media is created (and posted) just because. What if media exists just to exist? We can praise the videos of police brutality and witnesses of bank robbery and the hanging of Saddam, but these videos only make up a small percentage of the millions and millions of videos that exist online. Most videos are mundane and have no reason for existing other than the creator’s own desire for them to exist.

And this is the beauty of YouTube. The fact that anyone can create and distribute their points of view to the world is what it’s all about. As new media consumers, we have to learn to accept the “good” with the “bad”, the “positive” with the “negative”, the “best” with the “junk”. Different videos mean different things to different people, and the fact that YouTube doesn’t discriminate allows people to come up with their own ideas about the world. They can take from a single channel of material and mold their own view of the world… without the media’s pressure or segmentation of audience. YouTube (and other web 2.0 technologies) can be everything to everyone – something no other media outlet can be.

All of this, of course, begs to be used in a classroom setting. I use YouTube for everything from finding examples of unfiltered world events to examples of concepts I’m teaching. Whatever your topic, just type it in and you’ll almost surely find examples of what you’re looking for. I encourage students to use the site by asking them to find examples of stereotyping, bias, and other media injustices. When I teach my broadcasting students how to give on-camera interviews, I find examples using YouTube. When I took an economics class to help sharpen my own business acumen, I searched for the concepts being discussed (supply and demand, etc.), and found that teachers had actually posted videos of themselves teaching it.

I think YouTube and the video revolution is still in its infancy. There is a lot more to be discovered and a lot more to learn about it and from it. Like how will YouTube on mobile phones affect how we consume the videos (and video media in general) in the future? Only time will tell.

PS. I’d be interested to know if and how you use YouTube in your classrooms!

In today’s age of instant information, messages can be sent from one person to many in a split second. Information is democratic – anyone and everyone has access to it quickly and easily. I can write a message on my blog, and have it seen instantly by thousands of people. I can send a message via Twitter, and everyone following me will see that message a second after I write it. I can hop on AIM and anyone also with AIM will see me and can ask/tell/explain anything they want.

Not since the advent of cable television have we been able to say so much to so many in so little time from so far away.

And this has been a double-edged sword in many cases. Because we’re constantly barraged with information, it can not only be difficult to keep up, but it can be difficult to figure out if the messages we receive are true or false, accurate or inaccurate. We try to be critical thinkers in the media we consume, and we hope our students are as well. But how can I think critically when I receive 40 “tweets” an hour and need to keep up with 24 blogs each day. I definitely believe I have my finger on the pulse of technology and changes in information, but how much is real, and how much is imagined? And at what cost?

First, consider the number of rumors flying around about the upcoming announcements at the Macworld Expo. Everyone is eager to know what Steve Jobs will introduce tomorrow. But how much of that information is accurate? The answer is: we don’t know. It’s all speculation. Does that automatically dismiss it as unimportant? Not necessarily. Does its speculative nature mean I should ignore it? No necessarily. If I choose to follow the Apple rumors, I should go into it knowing there will be a huge build up of speculation before the keynote. The other issue is, of course, how much of that speculation is coming from Apple’s own PR department making people want to know even more? We can call this fabricated anticipation. But even though the PR is fabricated, the fans’ anticipation is real.

Let’s look at the cost. As an aficionado of economics, I always like looking at the opportunity cost of everything – the best thing I have to give up in order to get something else. Right now I’m on break from teaching for another month, so looking at 24 blogs each day carries a low opportunity cost – the best thing I’d be giving up is watching CNN or taking a walk outside. But when I go back and teach four classes and conduct workshops and continue filming and editing my new documentaries, it will be nearly impossible to keep up with so much information. So my question here is: what good is the information if you can’t keep up with it? This, of course, is what news outlets do best – condense the information into a nice cute little one-hour package – but then I’m back at square one… relinquishing the power of information gathering to someone else with their own interests in mind. So going back to some economic principles – as my time spent teaching goes up, my ability to keep up with raw information myself goes down.

Just as with everything in life, a balance must be struck. I have to relinquish some of my own thinking to a trusted third party… I simply can’t keep up myself, so someone else needs to. Instead of checking 100 sources of information per day, I’ll only check 10 that will hopefully contain the best of the 100 sources. That means I can shift my brain from seeking out 100 sources to critically analyzing the compiled information from the 10 sources. We do this everyday when we watch a newscast instead of going to each place there is news happening, or read a newspaper instead of calling local and national governments ourselves for the scoop.

This is why media literacy is more important than ever in today’s information glut world.